TEXAS: The Home of Magic Bullets

Author Linda Brady Traynham
Whatever it is in Texas that creates “magic bullets” has struck again. According to reports, Major Nigal Malik Hassan, a psychiatrist, killed 12 people and wounded 31–unless no one is telling us about “friendly fire,”–with two pistols, “one of them a semiautomatic,” according to AOL.

Most of America shivers in delicious horror over the term “semiautomatic,” which means only that one bullet is fired each time the trigger is pulled until the gun is empty. To be precise, a revolver such as Roy Rogers carried shoots one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, ditto. Just holding the trigger back does not cause a stream of fire.

Rambo, Al Quaeda, drug lords, imperial guards, and such carry full automatic weapons which can spew out six or seven hundred rounds in a minute, or as long as the ammo lasts.

Pistols are an exceptionally poor choice if one wishes to go on a rampage, but we are already supposing charitably that Major Hassan (sometimes spelled “Hasan” in different reports) was either not in his right mind (one would think a psychiatrist and his colleagues would notice a small detail like that), or that modern soldiers and investigators are not trained to count, or perhaps that Major Hassan was motivated by religious reasons…or, quite possibly, that the Army was hasty in releasing two men who were interrogated as possible accomplices.

Let’s go back to how guns work. If one pistol was a semiautomatic, then it follows that the other was a revolver or “wheel gun.” As a very good rule, a revolver holds six shots; some hold five, a very rare one holds ten, and sensible people keep the 6th hole in the cylinder empty (unless they plan on shooting a lot of people) because revolvers do not have safeties. It is better not to have a round where the hammer could hit it. (Imagine that. The plain old 1911 Colt .45 semiautomatic is safer than a cowboy gun because it is harder to shoot yourself accidentally, not that I have ever known anyone who did.)

As a very good rule, semiautomatic handguns (oooh, that frisson reminescent of the ones reporters get when beholding The Obamessiah), hold ten rounds, or cartridges. Some only hold eight or nine; it depends on how long the clip is and how tight the spring is. There are a few that will take 16 rounds, but there is no point in wearying you with stagger-stacked clips. Just take my word for it. Such guns are large enough to be difficult to conceal unless the Major were wearing his field jacket, unlikely on a beautiful day such as today.

Everybody with me for one of my famous arithmetic lessons? Six plus sixteen still equals twenty-two, does it not? It is far more likely that the ammo available in the two pistols was 6 + 10 = 16.

That’s pretty fancy shooting, to kill or wound 33 individuals with only 16 shots; the Little Tailor would have been envious. A minimum of two with each blowback…little gun joke there, don’t worry about it. If someone shoots at you some night and his gun is wreathed in a large firey ball, his weapon used “blowback” instead of…oh, never mind.

Even if we grant that Major Hassan had a speed loader for the revolver and a spare clip for the semi, we can only get up to 32 rounds, which would be darned good shooting in any man’s Army. Or Jihad.

In addition, some of the shooting took place at the Deployment Center, Building 42006 (I think), where patients with brain trauma are treated, was mentioned…and there are reports of gunfire at the Base Theater.

Wowza, folks, this is bigger than Dallas!

Let’s see if we can reconstruct the action:

Since there are no reports of the Major screeching “Allah Akhbar” or “Death to all infidels,” we will suppose kindly that he was shooting for some other reason than a desire to see paradise and the virgins rather than Afghanistan.

He enters a large room full of fit, young, unarmed fighting men, draws his trusty revolver and pistol and starts to shoot at assorted men and women.

There he is, the only man in the room with a gun (this is dumb even for the Army. Lt. Gen. Cone says the men are armed only when undergoing training exercises. I can attest that the security forces are now Homeland Security.)

Um…if YOU were in a room under those circumstances, would you and your Army buddies just stand there and wait for the thud? This room full of trained, healthy troops ready to be deployed can’t come up with even two or three with the presence of mind to rush the shooter? That’s they way you get Medals of Honor and battlefield commissions, even if you don’t care about your hide. Did they freeze in fear? Or perhaps they can all count and thought, “Well, he’s only got 16 rounds, 32 max, so I think I’ll stand still and take my chances?” Or “Hey, it’s not my war?” As the Brits say, “Yank the other one. It’s got bells on it.”

The more we consider the official version, the more absurd it gets. The very highest number of cartridges we can come up with barring reloading each gun is 26 and that supposes that Major Hassan puts the empty pistol in his pocket, fired the last few rounds out of the semiautomatic, drops the empty clip out of the handle of the weapon (we’re supposing it slid out immediately and smoothly, not usually the case), found the spare, slammed it home, racked the slide to jack a round in the chamber, and was ready to pull the trigger another ten times. What in blazes were people doing while that went on? It’s a two-handed operation and takes at least a few seconds.

Having gotten his first 26 rounds off, he dropped the semiautomatic pistol or threw it–and again I ask…what were the troops doing while this was going on?…tipped the cylinder on the pistol out, grabbed the speed loader, and got himself another six rounds. It can’t be done instantly even by someone accustomed to handling speed loaders–and those are generally competition shooters, not cops or regular military. This guy’s a psychiatrist, for goodness’ sake. He spent most of his military career going to med school on the taxpayers’ enormous stack of dimes.

In order to get a single shooter 32 shots we’re hypothesizing that he reloaded each weapon once. By that time there were surely dead and bleeding bodies all over the floor–unless you want to suppose that he missed a bunch of his first shots. (If that is how it was, then Homeland Security has to account for a lot of the dead and wounded.) Perhaps all those fine young volunteers were still saying, “This is America. It can’t happen here.” Many of them have played video war games for years and may have thought the respawning ground was around somewhere. Surprise, guys, this isn’t “Call to Duty IV.”

Meanwhile over at the Theater…who is there? Did Major Hassan empty both pistols and reload while running to the theater? I’m not familiar enough with Fort Hood to know how far it is, but I think main post covers something like 44,000 acres.

If Major Hassan wasn’t shooting at the theater, who was? If nobody got shot at the theater or the brain trauma unit, we’re back to evil’s version of Audie Murphey killing or wounding 33 individuals before someone or ones arrived to put four holes in him.

At present Major Hussan is reported in “critical but stable” condition with four holes in him, expected to live.

Cynical snicker from someone who was alive when JFK was shot and has heard of Jack Ruby. I’m not anticipating hearing any explanations from Major Hassan.

Early reports were of 7 dead and 11 wounded. Over the course of several hours that went up to 12 dead and 31 wounded. Now, I don’t have much respect for the news media, but can’t any of them count either? Or did the shooting go on for longer than it sounds like?

WHILE we’re on the subject, what sort of performance is this by Homeland Security? They took over guarding the gates of Ft. Hood over a year and a half ago; I noticed, and I was highly offended. Every male I am related to by birth or marriage was career military; one of the rituals I prize most is acknowledging the sentry. I don’t do that for the HS gang–and I didn’t care for their attitude, either. They swagger around wearing sidearms giving those of us who have a perfect right (AND the proper documentation and stickers on our cars) to be there a hard time…but they can’t manage to get over to where shooting is occurring before a dozen are dead and two and a half dozen are wounded, and then the worst they can do is shoot the newest “lone gunman” four times without killing him? Lord love a duck.

Your only other choice is that they shot a bunch of bystanders. How do we know what sort of military training HS has? They obviously weren’t up to the job on this Guy Fawkes day.

I don’t know what, if anything, the Street is going to think about this, but my first question is, “Was Major Hassan a member of IPSA or a candidate for the Olympic pistol team?” Perhaps it could be done by someone who does a lot of real Hogan’s Alley or has been through an Al Quaeda training camp.

Supposedly this guy is blazing away with both guns, and even in a target-rich environment that is extraordinarily fine shooting for a man under stress firing dissimilar weapons. We haven’t heard anything about calibers but even if both were .45 caliber they handle differently.

In addition to which, there are very few of us old-fashioned dueling stance shooters left; nobody teaches a one-handed grip any more. Depending on where he got his training, the Major either fell into the ludicrous Weaver stance FBI style and clasped both hands around the gun–ONE gun–or he locked his left hand around his right wrist to steady the hand holding the gun. ONE gun. (Okay, “subordinate” hand around his “dominant” hand, if you want to worry about whether or not he were left-handed.)

This whole thing stinks. It is amateurish. It isn’t even plausible. They can claim “lone gunman” all they want to…so long as they show us ballistic evidence to account for every bullet in a body (living or dead) and every bullet with striations that match Hassans’ guns and the weapons fired by however many Homeland Security types showed up eventually. It wouldn’t hurt to search the walls and ceiling for stray shots.

When I was six I believed in Lash LaRue and the Cisco Kid, but I’m not buying the tale of a deranged two-fisted psychiatrists who shot 33 people with nothing more than a revolver and a semiautomtic handgun. Tell that one to the Greenie Gun-Grabbers, because the old shooters won’t believe it. I didn’t believe in Magic Bullets forty-five years ago, and I’m sure not buying what’s on the wire services and TV stations right now.

Regards,

Linda Brady Traynham

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 2:06 am and is filed under Authors, Linda Brady Traynham, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.